In general, an industrial plant management system is designed to manage a plurality of devices such as a plurality of plant devices, in other words, field devices such as valves, pressure sensors, and temperature sensors in a plant. The management system may include, but is not limited to, a device management system is designed to provide for a centralized management of large amounts of data from plant monitoring and control devices and manufacturing equipment. The device management system is used together with one or more process control systems such as distributed control systems (DCSs) that are designed to control the plurality of field devices through one or more network systems including field control systems (FCS) in the plant. An industrial plant management system for controlling and managing the plurality of field devices may include, but is not limited to, the control system for controlling the plurality of field devices, and the management system configured in cooperation with the control system.
For managing plant asset value, the industrial plant management system may, in some cases, need an additional manager as a plant asset value manager. The plant asset value manager is designed to increase or maximize plant asset value. The plant asset value manager may, in some cases, monitor all plant devices or field devices through the process control system such as distributed control systems (DCSs) and the device management system. The plant asset value manager is configured to manage field device configurations from the device management system. The plant asset value manager is also configured to perform diagnostic functions and to manage performance of one or more control loops as control units based on control loop configurations from the process control system such as distributed control systems (DCSs). Each control loop or unit includes a respective field control system (FCS) and a connected group of field devices which are subject to the controls by the field control system (FCS).
In the control process, the following facets have to be investigated. The control loop components that are responsible for this performance loss has to be investigated and determined. The impact of valve performance loss and other device performance loss on the relevant loops also has to be investigated and determined. The existing system performs the above process as implementation as to determine how the loops and their constituent valves and other devices are configured. The definitions, for example, engineering data of the control systems such as the distributed control system (DCS) and the process control system (PCS) and the management system are manually examined with time consuming. This manual examination process includes a time-consuming process for manually identifying the relationship between the control loops and the connected valves and other field devices.
FIG. 1A is an exemplified display image on a display device screen which shows two control loops and plural control valves. The following descriptions with reference to this exemplified display image are illustrative purpose for briefly understanding one example, but not all, of the manual examination process. For example, in the first process, to determine which device is associated with one control loop in the distributed control system (DCS), it is necessary to check DCS Control Drawing Builder and FieldBus builder to find the device tag involved. In the second process, it is necessary to check the device management system to find the devices above. In the third, final process, it is necessary to manually link or associate each control loop and a respective group of one or more filed devices which are subject to the control loop. To determine how the loop and field devices operate with respect to each other at any instant in time, the industrial plant system is used to manually select and view the followings: the values indicating performance loss for each relevant loop-device tag (diagnostic results “KPI”); and the raw data trends.
FIG. 1B is an exemplified display image on a display device screen which shows two control loops that are complex loops with multiple inputs and multiple outputs. The first control loop in left is for the pressure transmitter, and the second control loop in right is for the level transmitter. The first and second control loops are substantially similar to each other in mechanisms and logic. For avoiding duplicate descriptions, the descriptions will be made hereafter for the first control loop in left.                i) Two transmitter input, Transmitter 1 and Transmitter 2 (which are shown as two blocks at the top of the left figure), they will give input to Dual Selector (represented in another block below);        ii) In Dual Selector, it performs selection of selecting among transmitter 1, OR transmitter 2, OR an average of transmitter 1 and 2;        iii) 4 small blocks (“T”, “T”, “LAG” and “PVI”), shown below the Dual Selector, are selectors, which are also used to complete the above selection;        iv) The selected input finally will be transmitted to PID controller (represented as “PID” block in the figure), and the controller will control PCV-B for #1DA or PCV-A for # IDA (devices), (they are also represented as blocks and in the bottom of the figure);        v) The blocks between PID controller and devices (PCV-B for # IDA or PCV-A for #1DA), are selectors, which will be chosen based on the output of the dual selector.        vi) The far left block is “Alarm”, which is used to check the feedback and control output.        
FIG. 2 is an exemplified display image on a display device screen which shows one example of the process for identifying the relationship between the control loops and the connected field devices. With the existing implementation, the procedure is manual and time-consuming to identify the relationship between the control loops and the connected field devices.